On efficiently processing nearest neighbor queries in a loosely coupled set of data sources

  • Authors:

  • Thomas Schwarz;Markus Iofcea;Matthias Grossmann;Nicola Hönle;Daniela Nicklas;Bernhard Mitschang

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany;University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany;University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany;University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany;University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany;University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 12th annual ACM international workshop on Geographic information systems
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

We propose a family of algorithms for processing nearest neighbor (NN) queries in an integration middleware that provides federated access to numerous loosely coupled, autonomous data sources connected through the internet. Previous approaches for parallel and distributed NN queries considered all data sources as relevant, or determined the relevant ones in a single step by exploiting additional knowledge on object counts per data source. We propose a different approach that does not require such detailed statistics about the distribution of the data. It iteratively enlarges and shrinks the set of relevant data sources. Our experiments show that this yields considerable performance benefits with regard to both response time and effort. Additionally, we propose to use only moderate parallelism instead of querying all relevant data sources at the same time. This allows us to trade a slightly increased response time for a lot less effort, hence maximizing the cost profit ratio, as we show in our experiments. Thus, the proposed algorithms clearly extend the set of NN algorithms known so far.